Microscope Captures 3D Movies of Living Cells

Zothecula writes "In some cases, looking at a living cell under a microscope can cause it damage or worse, can kill it. Now, a new kind of microscope has been invented by researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that is able to non-invasively take a three dimensional look inside living cells with stunning results. The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes and could help biologists to achieve their goal of understanding the rules that govern molecular processes within a cell."

Comments

Living cells?

[BergZ]

I figured the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, if they are anything like their founder, would be more interested in producing new ways to kill microbes rather than study them!

Not much at Gizmodo

[ColdWetDog]

Just some mindless drivel and a few pics - for a bit more, do a search on "Bessel+beam+plane+illumination+microscopy". Basically, it is a system that uses a narrow collimated light beam that is stepped through a cell to excite photons (it appears that they're using flourescent dyes, not clear if you have to do that), pick up the photons in a detector and reconstruct the image, much like at CT or MRI.

While researchers have been able to use monoclonal antibodies to tag internal bits of cells, you either got fairly poor spatial resolution of living cells because you were imaging the entire cell depth or you got excellent spatial resolution of dead, fixed cells with the obvious issues of stopping a dynamic process. This method, if they can work it out a bit better (resolution doesn't seem to be all that good yet) would combine the advantages of tagging cells at high resolution but using living cells.

Re:Not much at Gizmodo

[Beezleboss]

Nitpicking here but, it's not exciting the photons, it's exciting the electrons in the fluorophores, which as they relax emit a photon of a different wavelength. It also says that they are using two photon microscopy which basically requires the energy from two simultaneous photon interactions with the electron to excite it to the required energy level, so yes the fluorescent probes are necessary. This will also retain the problems that the article claims to remove, namely the damaging of the cells and photobleaching (exciting the fluorophore to a point where it is no longer fluorescent) because light of the same wavelength as previous techniques is still needed to excite the fluorophore and so is still being applied to the cell. The only benefit in this regard is that (probably) less light is applied, so the effects will take longer to appear.

Re:Not much at Gizmodo

[interkin3tic]

While researchers have been able to use monoclonal antibodies to tag internal bits of cells, you either got fairly poor spatial resolution of living cells because you were imaging the entire cell depth or you got excellent spatial resolution of dead, fixed cells with the obvious issues of stopping a dynamic process.

Antibodies are usually used with fixed (dead) cells. Fluorescent proteins like GFP can be used to visualize live cells just fine. Get a cell to express GFP (pretty easy to do) and you can watch them with any fluorescent microscope at high resolution. You can even fuse the GFP to other proteins to visualize specific structures within the cell. Here is an example: the red is marking microtubules, the green is marking chromatin during mitosis. Extremely high resolution.

As far as spatial resolution, I think they're talking about -depth-. X and Y spatial resolution is fairly good, and with some of the super resolution microscopy techniques, they're better than we thought they could be. Z resolution with confocals or 2 photon is comparatively poor. The image I saw on the "Bessel+beam+plane+illumination+microscopy" it appeared that depth resolution was just as good as X and Y planes. That is an improvement, but there is quite a bit you can tell from 2d images, and the 3d capabilities aren't so bad these days.

It's called a "Laser"

[lopaka1998]

>>The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes

Dr. Evil: Okay no problem. Here's my second plan. Back in the 60's, I had a weather changing machine that was, in essence, a sophisticated heat beam which we called a "laser."

Re:It's called a "Laser"

[blair1q]

Yurp. And bar-code scanners don't use a "thin sheet" they use a thin beam that scans back and forth rapidly. It just looks like a thin sheet. To virgins.

I have an idea ...

[justinlee37]

Stop creating explanations for the existence of life and the universe without evidence and then trying to make the available evidence fit into your explanation. That is a sure-fire way to end up with a faulty scientific process and a biased opinion to boot.

Sincerely, an agnostic.

Mirror

[antdude]

http://www.gizmag.com.nyud.net/3d-microscope-movies-living-cells/18138/ since the server is dying with "Unavailable
This website is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.
Unfortunately there were no suitable nodes available to serve this request." error message. :(